Great Throughts Treasury

"Cynics regarded everybody as equally corrupt... Idealists regarded everybody as equally corrupt, except themselves."

""Mind" is a tool invented by the universe to see itself; but it can never see all of itself, for much the same reason that you can't see your own back (without mirrors)."

"A chicken is the egg?s way of making more eggs."

"?Elohim,? the name for the creative power in Genesis, is a female plural, a fact that generations of learned rabbis and Christian theologians have all explained as merely grammatical convention. The King James and most other Bibles translate it as "God," but if you take the grammar literally, it seems to mean "goddesses." Al Shaddai, god of battles, appears later, and YHWH, mispronounced Jehovah, later still."

"A true initiation never ends."

"A monopoly on the means of communication may define a ruling elite more precisely than the celebrated Marxian formula of monopoly in the means of production."

"A disciple is an asshole looking for a human being to attach itself to."

"According to Zen Buddhism, and most forms of Buddhism, and quantum mechanics, any description of the universe which leaves you out is inaccurate, because any description of the universe, and the description of the instrument that you use to take your reading of the universe -- if the only instrument you use is your own nervous system, you gotta include your own nervous system in your description of the universe."

"According to the latest [wobbly] figures, since Gush and Bore each got the vote of [roughly] 25% of the eligible voters, and Nobody got the vote of [roughly] 50%, then Nobody won. Adding the "protest votes" for Nader, Browne etc., nobody won even bigger, around 55%. Since in this carefully rigged system, third party votes are, in effect, votes for Nobody. The people who voted for those "minority" candidates certainly didn't expect them to win; they just expressed their contempt for the 2 Lying Bastards more actively than those of us who just stayed home, got stoned and looked at Three Stooges videos."

"All of us should treasure his (John Dillinger) Oriental wisdom and his preaching of a Zen-like detachment, as exemplified by his constant reminder to clerks, tellers, or others who grew excited by his presence in their banks: Just lie down on the floor and keep calm."

"All phenomena are real in some sense, unreal in some sense, meaningless in some sense, real and meaningless in some sense, unreal and meaningless in some sense, and real and unreal and meaningless in some sense."

"All that we know is what registers on our brains, so what you perceive (your individual reality-tunnel) is made up of nothing but thoughts?as Sir Humphrey Davy noted when self-experimenting with nitrous oxide in 1819, and as Buddha noticed by sitting alone until all his social imprints atrophied and dropped away."

"Animals outline their territories with their excretions, humans outline their territories by ink excretions on paper."

"An Enlightened Master is ideal only if your goal is to become a Benighted Slave."

"And Spaceship Earth, that glorious and bloody circus, continued its four-billion-year-long spiral orbit about the Sun; the engineering, I must admit, was so exquisite that none of the passengers felt any motion at all. Those on the dark side of the ship mostly slept and voyaged into worlds of freedom and fantasy; those on the light side moved about the tasks appointed for them by their rulers, or idled waiting for the next order from above."

"An optimistic mind-set finds dozens of possible solutions for every problem that the pessimist regards as incurable."

"As an advocate of jury nullification, I also believe in the equally old tradition that juries should be chosen totally at random. In the early days, a jury was the first twelve men the bailiff saw when he walked out the door of the court. It should be both men and women, of course, but it should remain equally random. The lawyers should have no ability to stack a jury. The traditional system, with its random factor, comes as close as humanly possible to obtaining a true cross section of the common sense, the common decency and the common humanity of the people, and I trust those factors, if not blindly the way Catholics trust the pope, certainly a lot more than I trust lawyers and judges."

"Any model we make does not describe the Universe, it describes what our brains are capable of saying at this time."

"Anyone in the United States today who isn't paranoid must be crazy."

"Bad critics judge a work of art by comparing it to pre-existing theories. They always go wrong when confronted with a masterpiece because masterpieces make their own rules."

"As for "morality" -- or "moralic acid" as Nietzsche called it -- I consider it the major cause of almost all the major atrocities not caused by "ideology." This wonderful invention, "morality," allows people -- normal, ordinary people -- to do things so cruel and violent that they could never bring themselves to do them for selfish reasons. What the sociopath and sadist do for fun, the "moralist" does on behalf of "duty" or "justice." "Morality," today, allows Moslems to stone women to death, as it once fuelled the Christian witch-hunts. "Morality" has excused every war, and glorified some of them. "Morality" constantly plots to subvert the Constitutional guarantee of free speech. "Morality" inspires gay-bashing and the bombing of women's clinics. Why, without "morality" we might all suddenly go stark staring sane."

"Belief in the traditional sense, or certitude, or dogma, amounts to the grandiose delusion, My current model -- or grid, or map, or reality-tunnel -- contains the whole universe and will never need to be revised. In terms of the history of science and knowledge in general, this appears absurd and arrogant to me, and I am perpetually astonished that so many people still manage to live with such a medieval attitude."

"Belief in external "obscenity" is the modern form of the witchcraft delusion."

"Beyond a certain point, the whole universe becomes a continuous process of initiation."

"Buddhists, semanticists and hypnotists know that we not only use words but are also easily mesmerized by them. Hypnotists in real life seldom have to use glittering jewels or shining mirrors as they do in films; the ordinary domesticated primate can be hypnotized quite quickly and easily with words alone, spoken in proper cadence and with abundant repetition. Advertisers try to hypnotize us all the time, and judging by the fees they collect from satisfied clients, they are doing very well at it. Having used hypnosis in my psychological seminars for nearly 20 years now, I am-quite prepared to agree with G.I. Gurdjieff and Colin Wilson that most people can be said to be hypnotized most of the time, and that the professional hypnotist only switches them from their habitual trance to a different trance. In fact, when I first started using hypnotism I was astounded that so many people went into deep trance quickly when I was only attempting to induce light trance. It was many years before I understood fully Gurdjieff's insistence that most people are sleep-walking in a deep trance state most of their lives. Now I am only astounded that many people actually come out of their trance often enough to remember, occasionally, what they intended to buy at the supermarket."

"Belief is the death of intelligence. As soon as one believes a doctrine of any sort, or assumes certitude, one stops thinking about that aspect of existence."

"But once you have a belief system everything that comes in either gets ignored if it doesn't fit the belief system or get distorted enough so that it can fit into the belief system. You gotta be continually revising your map of the world."

"But they can rule by fraud, and by fraud eventually acquire access to the tools they need to finish the job of killing off the Constitution.' 'What sort of tools?' 'More stringent security measures. Universal electronic surveillance. No-knock laws. Stop and frisk laws. Government inspection of first-class mail. Automatic fingerprinting, photographing, blood tests, and urinalysis of any person arrested before he is charged with a crime. A law making it unlawful to resist even unlawful arrest. Laws establishing detention camps for potential subversives. Gun control laws. Restrictions on travel. The assassinations, you see, establish the need for such laws in the public mind. Instead of realizing that there is a conspiracy, conducted by a handful of men, the people reason?or are manipulated into reasoning?that the entire population must have its freedom restricted in order to protect the leaders. The people agree that they themselves can't be trusted."

"Certitude belongs exclusively to those who only own one encyclopedia."

"Comparative religion and philosophy show that the Thinker can regard itself as mortal, as immortal, as both mortal and immortal (the reincarnation model) or even as non-existent (Buddhism). It can think itself into living in a Christian universe, a Marxist universe, a scientific-relativistic universe, or a Nazi universe ? among many possibilities. As psychiatrists and psychologists have often observed (much to the chagrin of their medical colleagues), the Thinker can think itself sick, and can even think itself well again. The Prover is a much simpler mechanism. It operates on one law only: Whatever the Thinker thinks, the Prover proves. To cite a notorious example which unleashed incredible horrors earlier in this century, if the Thinker thinks that all Jews are rich, the Prover will prove it. It will find evidence that the poorest Jew in the most run-down ghetto has hidden money somewhere."

"Consciousness itself is an infinite regress. This explains coincidences."

"Conspiracy is just another name for coalition."

"Discordians don't have dogmas, which are absolute beliefs; we have catmas which are relative meta-beliefs. And the central discordian catma is, as I said before, any affirmation is true in some sense, false in some sense, meaningless in some sense, true and false in some sense, true and meaningless in some sense, false and meaningless in some sense, and true and false and meaningless in some sense. And if you repeat this 666 times, you will achieve supreme enlightenment -- IN SOME SENSE!"

"Each man spills the drink he loves."

"Encounters with death and danger are only adventures to the survivors."

"Dr. Lecter, my candidate for the male archetype of 1951-2000, will never win any Nice Guy awards, I fear, but he symbolizes our age as totally as Bloom symbolized his. Hannibal's wit, erudition, insight into others, artistic sensitivity, scientific knowledge etc. make him almost a walking one man encyclopedia of Western civilization. As for his "hobbies" as he calls them ? well, according to the World Game Institute, since the end of World War II, in which 60,000,000 human beings were murdered by other human beings, 193, 000,000 more humans have been murdered by other humans in brush wars, revolutions, insurrections etc. What better symbol of our age than a serial killer? Hell, can you think of any recent U.S. President who doesn't belong in the Serial Killer Hall of Fame? And their motives make no more sense, and no less sense, than Dr. Lecter's Darwinian one-man effort to rid the planet of those he finds outstandingly loutish and uncouth."

"Does all of this make me a Leftist or a Rightist? I leave that for the Euclideans to decide. If I had to summarize my social credo in the briefest possible space, I would quote Alexander Pope?s Essay On Man: ?For forms of Government let fools contest; Whate?er is best administered is best: For modes of Faith let graceless zealots fight; He can?t be wrong whose life is in the right.?"

"Dr. Wilhelm Reich was condemned for unscientific claims by the Food and Drug Administration in 1956 because of his theories about sexual freedom and his discovery of an alleged "orgone" energy. He quickly became the most world-famous victim of the FDA's quest to impose One True Faith on medical practice in the United States, because the Feds not only destroyed all the equipment in Dr. Reich's experimental laboratory but burned all his books, too, in an incinerator, and then they put him in jail where he died of a heart attack. Since many disapprove of this unconstitutional way of silencing heresy, Dr. Reich has remained a center of controversy. ? In addition to his bio-physical heresies, Dr. Reich vastly offended many people by his sociological theory, which holds that fascism is just an exaggerated form of the basic structure of sex-negative societies and has existed under other names in every civilization based on sexual repression. In this theory, the character and muscular armor of the average citizen ? a submissive and frightened attitude anchored in body reflexes ? causes the average person to want a strong authority figure above them. Tyranny, in this model, is not created by tyrants alone but by neurotic masses who want tyrants."

"Ego is a social fiction for which one person at a time gets all the blame."

"Entropy requires no maintenance."

"Every fact of science was once damned. Every invention was considered impossible. Every discovery was a nervous shock to some orthodoxy. Every artistic innovation was denounced as fraud and folly. The entire web of culture and ?progress,? everything on earth that is man-made and not given to us by nature, is the concrete manifestation of some man?s refusal to bow to Authority. We would own no more, know no more, and be no more than the first apelike hominids if it were not for the rebellious, the recalcitrant, and the intransigent. As Oscar Wilde truly said, ?Disobedience was man?s Original Virtue."

"Everyone has a belief system, B.S., the trick is to learn not to take anyone's B.S. too seriously, especially your own."

"Everyone look around and see if you can spot the NARCS. They're the ones who look like hippies."

"Every morning I have been looking at CNN to see if there is any reason for hope. I see a few large and impressive peace protests here and there around the world, but mostly I see empty robot faces monotonously reciting the magic incantations, "We must support the President" and "We must support our troops", both of which mean the killing must continue."

"Every model we make tells us how our mind works as much as it tells about the universe. These are just human symbolic games. The universe itself is bigger than any of our models."

"Every Theology and every Ideology, it seems to me, is an endeavor in hypnotism and self-hypnotism. If there is one thing that everybody knows in common sense ? when they are in "their right minds" and not hypnotized ? it is that "all generalizations are hazardous" and that individual cases are each unique. The function of Theological and Ideological hypnosis is to forget this common sense and follow a robot-program that evades the responsibility of thinking and feeling anew in each unique situation. It is not just the other gang's Theology or Ideology that is nefarious: all Theology and Ideology is nefarious. It is a form of sleep-walking in which we can do monstrous things because we are not alive, awake and aware of who we are, where we are and what is going on around us."

"Every type of bigotry, every type of racism, sexism, prejudice, every dogmatic ideology that allows people to kill other people with a clear conscience, every stupid cult, every superstition, written religion, every kind of ignorance in the world all results from not realizing that our perceptions are gambles."

"Every war results from the struggle for markets and spheres of influence, and every war is sold to the public by professional liars and totally sincere religious maniacs, as a Holy Crusade to save God and Goodness from Satan and Evil."

"Everybody abstracts a different reality. When you come through a room, you abstract the reality you're prepared to abstract. You pick up the signals that interest you. Your brain records them and organizes them."

"Everybody who has ever worked for a corporation knows that corporations conspire all the time. Politicians conspire all the time, pot-dealers conspire not to get caught by the narcs. The world is full of conspiracies. Conspiracy is natural primate behavior."